Saturday, November 22, 2008

Peace
happens in the most impossible places. This past summer, at a crowded
downtown Kyoto shopping arcade between a reggae-themed clothes stall and
a hyper-hip music store blaring a conjoined brain-shred of Burning
Spear and Infected Mushroom, I discovered a Buddhist temple tucked away
down a little path, its presence indicated by a marble pedestal
supporting a sutra-incised granite prayer wheel that spun effortlessly
beneath my reverent fingers, summoning the Unseen. At the temple
fountain I performed the ritual hand-washing, then slipped off my shoes
and ascended the smooth wooden steps to the sanctuary. As was often the
case at the dozens of shrines and temples I visited in my two weeks in
Japan, I had the place to myself. The tatami matting comforted my weary
tourist feet, grounding me to serenity. Only a few yards away music
still thudded from the teeming mall, but I no longer heard it. I was far
elsewhere, in a place I cannot describe, but which was far more
immediate to me than the world I returned to, refreshed and at rest, a
little while later.

I put together a
butsudan once I got back to the States, to commemorate and re-live that
rescuing tranquility. Japanese butsudan are exquisite objects, but they
can seem too much like dollhouses for gods--a profusion of gilded
lacquer and ornamentation as costly as the owner can afford, with
expensive ritual food offerings and rare flowers and images meant to be
worshipped. I'm not sure the Buddha would have approved, prince though
he was. So I took a little yard-sale table and spray-painted it black,
and placed it in the southwest corner of my reading room--that direction
is special to me, since it evokes the Four Corners--and above the table
I hung a batik picture of Kwannon, the goddess of mercy. On the table I
arranged the following objects:

A dish
full of mostly blue-and-white porcelain shards collected during my trip.
It's very common to find bits of broken offering bowls and cups around
shrines and Shinto graves; earthquake tremors or misadventure are most
likely to blame for the breakage, since vandalism seems virtually
nonexistent in Japan (with the exception of Western-style graffiti
around Tokyo's Shinjuku ward, where Lost in Translation was
filmed--why is it that the rest of the world seems to choose the worst
things about America to emulate?). I grouped the shards around a simple
holder enclosing a stick of the kind of incense sold only at shrines,
thick, slow-burning and divinely fragrant.

A wooden statuette of the type called the Weeping Buddha, face buried in and hidden by agonized hands, knees bent in fetal angst instead of the customary crosslegged attitude.

A little brass
handbell from India, thrillingly sweet and clear at even the slightest
ring, that my grandmother borrowed from me for my great-grandmother's
use during her final illness; one of the very few things I possess from
my past.

Pebbles collected over many years from many countries, and a 27-bead mala of rose quartz and jade that I made myself.

A vase to contain
fresh sprigs of the evergreen cherry laurel that grows around the house,
reminding me that winter can't kill everything.

Every morning I stand at my butsudan and ring the bell, and drape my mala over my hands and make the sign of the wai, and bow my head in reflection. I don't pray because I can't, but my hopes tend to take the following shape:

May I be grateful for this day, and live it as well as I can.

May I perform some action that makes a good difference.

May my creative energies be focused to their sharpest, and find their best expression.

May I always cherish others for their kindness, and remember that harboring ill will weakens the soul.

May I be mindful that of all qualities, arrogance is the most injurious, and the ability to forgive the noblest.

May I always recognize delusion and avoid it, and may those now in error do the same.May I never forget that only the end of the world is the end of the world.

I then
think of people and situations I'm especially concerned about, hoping
the best for them; and then I bow twice and proceed with the rest of my
day, wishing it might be tinged by the ritual. To my grateful surprise,
it very often is.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

12:21 PM PST, November 15, 2008

November is, and has been since 1998, National Novel Writing Month. According to recent studies, many more Americans are writing instead of reading, and no wonder.

One of
Paul Simon's songs begins with the feeling observation "When I think
back on all the crap I learned in high school/It's a wonder I can think
at all." By the same token, when I consider the fiction I was forced
to read far too soon in that ill-remembered milieu, I can't blame anyone
for not cracking a book after graduation. Wuthering Heights and The
Scarlet Letter I especially recall as sheer torment, inflicted by the
overworked bored on the restless apathetic, taught in a total vacuum
with no attention paid to the utterly foreign worlds in which they were
set, or the life and times of the authors who created them. What
astounds me most is that these books and others of their dour ilk are
still being forced upon luckless high schoolers in the same sullen,
context-free manner decades later, in a milieu that has changed so much
that the name Miranda no longer evokes a brave new world or even Huxley
(another author I read far too soon), but instead a cop-uttered formula.
Incredibly, it's still a self-perpetuating given that no one
voluntarily reads a novel after high school, and since this sole brush
with literature will be the last, it needs must be forcibly administered
like bitter medicine. For all too many the loathing engendered lasts a
lifetime...a stunted, light-deprived lifetime. Some disturbing
information can be found at this site,
beginning with "1/3 of high school graduates never read another book
for the rest of their lives." I won't go into the 1/3 of the population
that doesn't graduate at all.

Still,
there's hope. Lots of people survive high school with their love of
reading intact, as I did. Like many others, I look forward to at least a
minor renaissance with the upcoming presidency. A holistic approach to
literature might come into fashion, thanks to the Internet's invaluable
ease of access and wealth of resources that make learning an at least
physically effortless pleasure, and galvanize independent spirit of
inquiry. Miranda just might rediscover that dream she believed in -- I
re-read Brave New World recently online, and it was terrific. I only
hope that a Google search someday finds her Shakespeare version in less
than the few hundred entries it currently entails.

A wealth of sites offer the entire world's best reading at no cost, and here are three of my favorites:The Digital Book Index